(via scriptingnews) Some thoughts on the mainstreaming of blogs and the definition of spam in this essay, Blogging, Trust, and Discovery by Bob Frankston. A sample:
I find the more interesting change is in the process of discovery. Being heard against the din of all the voices is hard and we have a large industry dedicated to just that. Marketing and advertising are important and often necessary. But they easily become pathological and there is no sharp distinction between spin and fraud. In fact they often overlap. Of more concern is the sheer volume of noise as the "in your face" motif becomes increasing necessary. At least in the view of those vying for attention.
categories: memewatch metablog syllabus
10:16:55 PM 
say what []
Via Backup Brain another ecosystem crawler, this one called organica.
categories: memewatch metablog
8:29:44 PM say what []
The Radio vs. Movable Type comparison has generated a lot of heat in the (literally) subtext, in the comments. Here are some highlights:
Comments in response to this post: ... It highlights the fact that there is no one "best" blogging tool, but rather, each tool offers a different feel and feature set. Now the next thing on your plate, Xian, should be an examination of the various client apps, such as w.bloggar, blogbuddy, etc... software that enables people to publish entries directly from a desktop app.
Adam Lasnik [alasnik@smilezone.com] • 8/14/02; 2:47:11 PM
one thing you didn't mention was newsfeeds. i'm assuming moveable type doesn't have a news aggregator? (radio is all i've used.) MT does not have a news aggregator. Radio tries to do many things, and to some degree, it succeeds admirably. It's quite feature-rich and very powerful under the hood.
MT, on the other hand, as Xian smartly noted, is much more focused on blogging. From my experience, then, it's MUCH easier to create a good looking and powerful BLOG with MT than with Radio. And perhaps more importantly, I honestly believe the default USER (visitor) experience is better with MT than with Radio.
I'm wondering how maintainable mt and radio are. I'm using radio now and it seems a little fragile. It's pretty easy (for me anyway) to tweak something and have the whole mess become inoperable. I get mysterious error messages at times.
But I'm similarly leery about a bunch of perl scripts running on a sql db on a remote unix server. How easy it it to screw the whole thing up?
Barry, I ran Radio and switched to MT, and I found Radio to be quite fragile, constantly required repairs and tweaking, and totally lacking in basic security measures. Radio has several major flaws in the closed-source components that cannot be fixed unless Dave decides to fix them (and he won't). MT on the other hand is quite robust, and has full source code accessible. Let me put it more clearly: Radio contacts the server and updates itself with patches every time you run it. Your machine is under Dave's control. Suppose one day Dave's server gets owned (again), your machine could now be compromised by a malicious patch. On the other hand, MT is written in Perl and the source code is available for your review. No code is installed except at your direction. Standard security protocols for MySQL, CGI, etc, are well known and MT runs in compliance with these best-practices. The MT community has been active in contributing improvements, some have been in corporated into the code, and now MT has a plugins structure to help coders enhance the base sw and still keep things manageable. The choice is simple, you can use proprietary closed-source Radio (and believe me, the flaws in the closed source model are all the more glaring in a company like Userland) or you can have MT and keep control over your own project. Anonymous Zaphodim [none@nospam.com] • 8/15/02; 12:02:40 PMA very nicely written review. I currently use both MT and Radio for different blogs, although I intend to move off Radio whenever I can find a long weekend to play with converting what I already have.
One point that you don't cover is that with MT, all the pain is upfront. With Radio, all the pain is downstream. Getting MT installed took me about an hour of very careful reading and doing, and it is easy to see how it could be screwed up, or not work. That said, you pay Ben and Meena your $20, and you don't have to deal with it. After that it just works.
Radio, on the other hand, was easy to install, and very easy to start blogging with. I was seduced by the ease of installation and the number of features. However, the more I use it, the more unstable it gets. It crashes regularly on my computer, and has now twice corrupted its internal database, losing me several days of posts. I have given up adding any links or changing my template in any way, because everytime I do I run into serious problems that require hours to debug. I now back up all of my radio directory every day, and have had to use those backups a couple of times.While I don't welcome Zaphodim using me to channel their vendetta, I do sympathize with Geodog. My Radio install has never crashed on me, but I've been using it less than a month of course. However, when you lose trust in the stability of a product, you stop putting your data into it. My sister had a Palm knock-off that never synched. What a nightmare. Anyway, if I had those problems I'd probably be discouraged too. Are you on a Mac or a PC? As for "Radio contacts the server and updates itself with patches every time you run it," I'm pretty sure you can turn off automatic updating of Radio.root, no? Can some more experienced UserLand-head correct me if I'm wrong?
Strikes me as a good review too. I have used Antville, MT and Radio, and found Radio perfectly OK, but offering no advantages, for me over Antville and/or MT. I recommend that you add Antville to your `must review' list---it is a good product and a sensible entry in this market space. That said, I appreciate the balance evident in your report even if I do occasionally disagree with your conclusions.
Did someone say 'zaphodim'?
Nice review, very informative. It's interesting to see how the two vendors handle it. ... That and the MT folks have an open forum for bug reports, feature requests, template tips and the like. The MT folks will even respond when their product can't live up to user demands. Try that with UserLand and you'll get a deafening silence; they won't even reply! And if you get really frustrated with Radio and dare to complain you'll be greeted with even more hostility! Dave will *personally* take action to block you from any further participation.
It's nice to see MT evolve. If news aggregation is the only thing you're missing by using MT then try using a product like Amphetadesk. Great stuff and has an equally cooperative developer. Or open a discussion with the MT folks and encourage them to implement news aggregation. They listen.
There's a pref for turning off automatic software updates on this page — it's the third checkbox. When unchecked, Radio will not install any software updates without being directed to do so by the user. All of the source code that runs the Radio application's UI and back-end ships with the application in readable and modifiable form. We've added extensive customization capabilities which you can take advantage of without any modification of the source code at all. What you can't do is ship modified versions of Radio's source code to other people, since that violates the end-user license.
Having said that, all sensible requests for new callbacks or other ways to extend or modify the Radio application will be seriously considered if posted to the radio-dev mailing list.
It's worth noting that there are two built-in backup options, one which archives all of your posts as XML files, and one which keeps a local mirror of your rendered website (HTML files).
Another feature that's not mentioned in your review: I'm not sure if MT tracks hits and referers, but Radio does this out-of-the-box. I think you'd have to add a 3rd-party hit-tracking or log-browsing tool to your server to get this in MT. Radio's stats and referer tracking works even if you choose to host your Radio site on a non-UserLand server using the FTP option (or some other upstreaming method).
Last, a note about security: You don't have to put your computer outside a firewall to access Radio remotely — you only have to open up HTTP on port 5335. You'd have to do something similar to run MT, except in that case it's port 80. Radio uses HTTP Authentication to control access to your desktop website. (I don't know what the Zaphodium is referrring to with "totally lacking in basic security measures". That statement is untrue on its face.)
Thanks for filling in those gaps in my knowledge. I may promote some of this discussion to entry content to make sure people can see the give and take. I think any company owner who puts his or her personality out online without hiding behind PR people deserves kudos, btw. I didn't find Dave's crit of my post to be in any way offensive. I invited corrections and additions. He is a passionate advocate of UserLand's way of doing things. There's nothing wrong with that. I also try to reveal my own biases. I'm enjoying learning about Radio as fast as I can, thinking about paying Salon and keeping this blog here, also considering using MT for some or all of my blogwork, and I admit that's partly an aesthetic thing with the interface and the swooning and all.
Most of all, by saying X vs. Y I'm not trying to imply a deathmatch but just a side-by-side comparison. Not quite as sprawling and impersonal as a giant chart, but qualitatively lookin at the feature sets (and indirectly, what they say about how people like to do their blogs).
I'm not trying to suggest conclusions for anyone else, David Neff. So what's this Antville you mention?
Movable Type is no more or less open source than Radio is. And I always get compliments on the support Jake and Lawrence provide on the discussion groups. I can't help people personally right now for health reasons. Dave, I would be curious for you to ellaborate on your comment that MovableType is no more or less open source then Radio. Being somewhat familar with both tools, I believe you are confusing open source with free (as-in-speech) software. MovableType is open source because *all* of its code is available for me to examine, fix and tweak. This is not completely the case with Radio. Like Radio, MovableType is not free software. Its license restricts its use and distribution without permission of Ben and Mena. How is open source defined? Not as free, I thought, but by the GPL?
categories: metablog
8:01:09 PM say what []
Ray Ozzie hits the nail on the head, detecting the architecture of the blogosphere and the benefits it confers through decentralizing the content management and enabling people to make the connections:
But blogs accomplish public discussion through a far different architectural design pattern. In the Well's terminology, taken to its extreme, you own your own words. If someone on a blog "posts a topic", others can respond, but generally do so in their own blogs, hyperlinked back to the topic's permalink. This goes on and on, back and forth. In essence, it's the same hyperlinking mechanism as the traditional discussion design pattern, except that the topics and responses are spread out all over the Web. And the reason that it "solves" the signal:noise problem is that nobody bothers to link to the "flamers" or "spammers", and thus they remain out of the loop, or form their own loops away from the mainstream discussion. A pure architectural solution to a nagging social issue that crops up online.
The downside? Well, part of why people like getting together is that unintended consequences can be quite rewarding. And there's a danger that the self-selecting environment of a given blogging community might limit unintended outcomes. But, then again, I could argue quite the opposite: in a traditional public discussion, a good idea might get lost in the noise.
5:49:09 PM say what []
Following up on Dave's post, I read about how the multi-author weblog tool uses RSS feeds to aggregate multi-author content. Cooool:
Everyone in the group writes with their own copy of Radio and publishes their weblog in both HTML and RSS. One of the editors takes responsibility for running the Multi-Author Weblog Tool, which joins all the individual feeds into a single weblog. This person is the webmaster of the multi-authored weblog.
Each hour when the news aggregator scans for new posts, any new items appearing in your author's feeds are automatically posted to the webmaster's weblog.
If you're the webmaster, it's important that you leave Radio running with the news aggregator enabled, at least during the hours when your authors will be writing new posts, since Radio can only update the weblog when the news aggregator scans for new items.
categories: metablog
5:09:49 PM say what []
I have some tapes of John Lennon reading the newspaper as a blues or Dylan tune. Listening to spamradio read the news to ambient accompaniment puts me straight into an alpha state.
"Please specify shoe size and color... Now you can have hundreds of vendors compete for your loan...This newsletter may or may not be the opinion of Wall Street Technology management... 100% free to home owners and new home buyers... 6209 don't worry 'bout me 4.15 magic 4.00 regards jason"
categories: memewatch x-pollen
4:15:52 PM say what []
Back when I started talking about business applications of (or lessons from) blogging, Mike Masnick sent me an interesting message about Techdirt.com, a multi-author (slashcode) technology/business news blog that's been running continuously since 1997 (that is, since before the word blog was coined).
One interesting thing is that Mike and his team managed to monetize the project by starting Techdirt Corporate Intelligence. Techdirt CI provides "enterprise blogs to technology companies.... Each gets a customized, private blog that is filled every day with links, summaries, and (most importantly) analysis of all the news that impacts them."
This is interesting to me, because it's a passive or "push" blog for the end-users. I suppose this can be thought of as sticking to their core competency and outsourcing the infograzing.
Mike tells me the company is profitable, running off revenue with no outside investment. In a sense I see this as a version of what Megnut's been talking about (I'd call her Meg but we've never met). You can say that Mike (with the help of his cohorts) established himself as a competent blogger (not just poster, but link-sifter, context-provider) and then found a nice independent way to get hired by numerous client to blog for them professionally.
Not as outreach but as intelligence.
categories: knowhow memewatch metablog
3:38:44 PM say what []
Not working on Windows most of the time lately, I haven't had a chance to try TopStyle yet. I wish they'd port it to OS X!
Anyway, I went from some blog to the Eatonweb portal and then through the TopStyle text ad where, after reading press-release type information about using TopStyle with Dreamweaver MX, I followed a link for TopStyle blog and learned that they've built a blog into TopStyle to send out news and updates.
So, another business-oriented use of a blog, and one or more implied professional (if not dedicated*) bloggers. You can also read the TopStyle blog in your browser:
Did you know that a blog is built into TopStyle Pro 3.0?A blog (short for "web log") is simply a frequently-updated web site which "logs" other sites of interest. The TopStyle Blog is updated every weekday with links of interest to web authors.
To access this blog from within TopStyle Pro 3.0, just click the "TopStyle News" button in the View Bar (shown below). You can also view the TopStyle Blog in your web browser.
categories: knowhow memewatch metablog
3:09:27 PM say what []
categories: metablog radioactive
1:25:28 PM say what []
As someone else pointed out in my comments, I left out some Radio features that MT lacks. Radio's news aggregator provides an easy way to keep up with other blogs and cross-reference them. That's really just the tip of the iceberg, because of course Radio opens up onto a scripting environment, the OPML shared outlines, and more goodies. These things all tie together in UserLand's vision of what blogs are and can be.
To me Movable Type, by contrast, is more like a streamlined content management system with many blog-specific features.
Dave's thoughtful feedback has naturally spiked my visitor count today, so thanks again, and welcome new readers! Here's what Dave had to say (go to his site for hyperlinked goodness). I'm interspersing some feedback because I think his points are important:
No mention of Radio's news aggregator. That's how multi-author weblogs work.Thanks again, Dave, for adding all that. All of my comparisons so far are a work in progress, and I'll probably rewrite them as Stories when I have some free time, heh.
I'm not quite sure I see how that equates to multi-author weblogs. The workflow involves quoting each other, right? Or am I missing something?Also no mention of shortcuts.
Mea culpa. I guess that's because I don't use them! Similarly, I'm also not much of a scripter (yet) in perl or Frontier or PHP, all of which I've now been exposed to, so I'm mostly dependent on the smarts and generosity of others for those little niceties that make a blog richer.The CMS in Radio is the same CMS as in Manila. You don't have to buy a license for Manila to run a Manila site, you can purchase Manila hosting at Weblogger.Com, and other places.
That's a really good point. I'm not even sure how UserLand can afford to give so much of Manila's functionality at such a relatively small price. I gather that Manila would offer the multi-blog functionality in the sense of having more ways to feed content into design? I know I need to learn more about Manila. It sounds like it might be perfect for at least one site I have in the works.And while I suppose UI is a matter of taste, we worked very hard to get all of Radio's functionality to flow through the Radio menu, where Movable Type spreads less functionality across several screens.
This is a valid point. The workflow and information architecture of Radio's interface really works and I have probably taken some of that for granted. The UI aspect of Movable Type that I really like is much more a matter of aesthetics, the look and feel. I haven't used MT so much yet and don't yet have a full sense of the process flows through it, but I have been seduced by the subtle grays and beveled drop shadows!In Radio, all the functionality is arrayed for you in one place at the top of every page. It means less hunting, and quicker navigation. One more thing, while macros are a relatively recent innovation in MT-Land, they're built in to Radio. Radio is the result of constant development in weblog software since 1996. The depth is there for you to use.
categories: memewatch metablog
12:47:14 PM say what []
Derek Powazek writes in his personal log that he'll be taking a break from it for a while, to pay attention to his many other irons in the fire. I respect this. Knowing when not to blog is as important as knowing when to. The daily-or-more habit is great but only if it's working for you.
Derek is an inspiration to me in many ways. For example, I like how he aggregates multiple weblogs on his home page, so I'm going to try to learn how RSS Monkey works.
categories: memewatch metablog
9:35:16 AM say what []
In Making the Move to Movable Type at Meryl.net, the author covers, very succinctly, the issues involved in migrating to MT.
Re one the comments to my comparison from yesterday: Radio Express does not seem to capture raw HTML for me, but this may because I am using IE6/Mac?
categories: metablog
7:25:41 AM say what []
Last night Gwen Ifill on The Lehrer News Hour mentioned how "we" (the newsmedia, I suppose) had been glued to the SEC website all day watching the CEO and CFO filings come in. These are the certifications required by the Sarbanes law, in which the company officers must swear that their balance sheets are accurate to the best of their knowledge, and that they have consulted with their audit committees about the numbers.
I turned to B and said "now there's another good use of the Internet." You can go there now and see who has filed and who hasn't.
categories: memewatch x-pollen
7:02:50 AM say what []
My agent told me yesterday that one of her other clients, Peter Rojas, was involved in a new blog called Gizmodo.com, a project of Nick Denton's.
Because he's getting paid (or at least partly for that reason) this new blog is the talk of blogdom. Nick has rounded up some of the latest discussion at his own blog:
Take a look, in particular, at the Blogroots discussion. Meg Hourihan, Matt Haughey and Dave Winer, among others, argue whether premeditated blogs are possible.I suspect it will appeal to overgrown girls as well [Meg Hourihan] Will Gizmodo be profitable? [Blogroots discussion] Gizmodo launch [Paul Boutin] Love gadgets. Gotta love the blog. [Jeff Jarvis] Breakeven, which for publishing ain't bad [Anil Dash] Introducing Gizmodo, the first e-commerce blog [Rick Bruner] It'll be an interesting experiment [601am.com] ... with a paid blogger! [Cory Doctorow]
categories: memewatch metablog
6:43:08 AM say what []
